The functions served by newspapers won’t die. But they will adapt to a new role, in light of the increased importance of niche media.

Newspapers got where they are by failing to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the Web. They rested on their laurels, relatively speaking, while others made the investments. So when we want to read about whatever topic, we hit the blogs, not the newspaper; and we want to find an apartment, we go to Craigslist, not the newspaper.

Since newspapers make their money from advertisers, not subscribers, they need to deliver more value to advertisers (both display and classifieds). But read any print newspaper, then read its online version: the ads in print are far more prominent and engaging. Online has to catch up. (That does not mean going back to the era of pop-ups and “punch the monkey” ads.) And newspapers have to find some way to lure back classified advertisers: they need to deliver a bigger and better audience than Craigslist, et al. — since they can’t compete on price — which might mean having to co-opt Craigslist itself in some way. As it is, newspapers are basically conceding classifieds except for employment ads (the only ones Craigslist charges for). And it’s super hard to compete with free (or something like that).

The other half of delivering more to advertisers is to earn more face time with readers. Adding comments, blogs, etc., as many newspapers are doing, is a good start. If I were running a newspaper, I’d add a shitload of blogs (all under the newspaper’s domain, so we get the Google juice from incoming links). The journalists would be blogging. There’d be insider blogs, from everybody from the copyeditors to the ad people, on how the newspaper is put together. (If reality TV has shown us anything, it’s that people love to see behind the curtains. Reigniting that sense of media belonging to the community will be key to increasing readership and goodwill, which plays its own funny role in encouraging people to read and advertise.) All existing local bloggers would be invited to join the paper, for pay (much less than a full-time salary, but probably more than the blogger is making from Google text ads [or none]) and reaching a larger audience. Finally, there wouldn’t be the guilt trips of “Hey! Subscribe! Please!” (Because really, a newspaper should be making more from online readers than from print. There’s no way fifty cents a day pays to put the paper on your doorstep; and there’s no way it costs fifty cents to put the paper on your desktop.) Instead, the paper would look for new revenue streams (there oughtta be plenty of ways to leverage all those eyeballs). I’d build a community-based media empire (rather than a corporate media empire that extends its tentacles into your community).